See the Shine
by Hotel Montana
Summary: Good heroes don't die. They go west. ScottJean, ScottLee 1of10
1. Black Sheep Boy

**Part One: **_See the shine in the black sheep boy._

It looked different than it had.

This was Scott's first, dull thought when he walked through the school's service entrance--the door with the security code least likely to have been changed in his absence--into the larder. In the dead dark of night, without the red warmth of his glasses, it looked foreign and unlike any place he'd ever called home. Even his hand on the keypad looked different, harder and rougher than it was before, red and chapped, one nail gone and another blackened from frostbite. They'd thought he might lose the finger. In the end, he'd been stubborn and kept it, though he'd lost most feeling in it and couldn't bend it so well.

Scott stopped there, inside the mansion, but just barely. He leaned back against the door, still feeling the outside air. It was cold that night, though not the bitter cold he'd become accustomed to; and it felt good against his back. The warmth inside was overpowering.

There was a light on in the kitchen. Scott saw the glow from around the swinging door. Squinting at the shine in the dark, he made up his mind for the last time. He put his changed hand on it, palm flat, and pushed. The door opened quietly, without protest, and swung shut behind him with a soft wooshing of air. The light he'd seen came from the hanging lamp over the oven, though one of the Viking's glass burners gave off its own powerful glow. The kettle began to whistle just as Scott stepped into the room, and Ororo switched the gas off without turning around.

"Back so early?" She poured steaming water into a big, heavy mug. "You didn't get into another fight, did you, Logan? That bar is going to start sending the bills to the school."

Scott watched her and said nothing. The first time he'd met her, another teenage runaway the Professor took off the street, she'd had hair, thick and pale, down to her waist. As long as Scott had known her, she'd been cutting it shorter and shorter. First a bit up her back and then to her shoulders. Bobbed just below her ears and then inches shorter, still. Now, it was closely cropped to her skull, multi-layered and disheveled. Deliberately messy, he was sure. Ororo always looked just as she meant to.

She dropped a metal straining spoon into the mug. It clinked against the sides, loud in the quiet of the kitchen. She picked the mug up, stirring the spoon with the other hand, and turned. She was smiling warmly, though she was expecting Logan. Scott saw how that had changed, too. Saw the place Logan had taken at the school and wondered how the man had changed so much that it was possible.

Ororo smiled when she turned, but the smile wasn't lasting. It fell at the same time that the mug dropped out of her hand, hitting the floor with a loud thud. It bounced once and then twice, spraying hot tea on the floor, the stove, Ororo's legs; but it didn't break. Her mouth opened and closed and opened again. Her eyes were wide, as though seeing an unspeakable horror.

"Scott?" she whispered.

He nodded and said, "Yes." His voice was harsh and rasping from long months of breathing salt spray and cigarette smoke, from shouting over the crashing din of the waves. It sounded foreign in the quiet of the kitchen.

"You're here."

"Here I am," he agreed.

"But you're dead. We thought you were dead."

Scott looked down at the ground, at his scuffed boots and dirty jeans, at his new, hard hands. He looked up again in time to see tears making their first tracks down her cheeks. He looked at Ororo, looked at the tears and the hair and the tea. He saw who she had been and who she was now. Scott looked at Ororo and answered, "I thought I was, too."

Ororo rushed at him, then, bringing with her a wavering uncertainty; and, for a moment Scott's hand twitched to pull at the glasses he no longer wore, no longer needed. But then Ororo was across the floor, lunging at him, throwing her arms around him. She was hugging him, and that last wiggling worm of doubt was gone. He didn't hesitate to wrap his arms around her, too, his strange, rough hands in loose fists behind her shoulders. Ororo was crying, gasping, babbling. He hugged her tightly and began to listen.

"Oh, god, Scott. Oh, god. There's a grave. There's so many. There's one for you. How could I do that? How could I give you a grave? How could you let me do that? Where have you been? Where have you been?" Ororo's voice broke. She grasped him closely to herself, as though the harder she held him, the more there he would be.

As though he might disappear, without a trace, if she let go.

"West." He spoke quietly, turning his face into her coarse, silver hair. "I've been west."


	2. Dramamine

**Part Two**: Dramamine

_Travelling, swallowing Dramamine  
Feeling spaced breathing out Listerine  
I'd said what I'd said that I'd tell you  
And that you'd killed the better part of me_

_  
If you could just milk it for everything  
I've said what I'd said and you know what I mean  
But I still can't focus on anything  
We kiss on the mouth but still cough down our sleeves_

_  
Travelling swallowing dramamine  
Look at your face like you're killed in a dream  
And you think you've figured out everything  
I think I know my geography pretty damn well_

_  
You say what you need so you'll get more  
If you could just milk it for everything  
I've said what I said and you know what I mean_

_  
But I can't still focus on anything_

Scott was never sure what pushed him out toward the highway, away from the water and from her. What possessed him, made him walk away, leave his bike behind and hike along the road with his thumb stuck out. His memories were hypnopompic, the hazy half-thoughts of a fugue. It was hours before he was really himself again, sitting shotgun in the cab of a big rig with a German Shepherd drooling on his knee and a gun-metal gray-haired woman named Margie at the wheel. Even then, he couldn't keep two together with two long enough for it to make four. Margie didn't seem to mind. She kept up a monologue about her grandkids in Ottawa, while Scott sat dry-mouthed and groggy, absently patting the dog's head.

At the end of her haul, Margie dropped her cargo off, and Scott with it. She told him that she made that particular trip once a month, if he found himself in need of a ride back east. She spoke slowly and asked if he understood. When he nodded, she patted him fondly on the shoulder. The Shepherd licked his hand. Margie pulled the horn and waved as she drove away. The Shepherd put his head out of the window, tongue flapping in the wind. Scott watched the road long after they were out of sight. Or he thought he did, anyway. It seemed as though one moment he was standing on the side of the road, and the next moment he was walking onto a boat.

Scott was never sure what pushed him out toward the sea, onto the ferry and away from the mainland. He stood at the rail with legs sure and steady and watched the buildings shrink into the distance.

On land again, there was a dock and a pub called the Leaky Barrel that served mostly seafood and beer. Scott sat at a table for two, the top chipped and scratched and stained, until his cod burger had gone cold and a large breasted woman was asking impatiently if he wanted yet another refill on his coffee. When he went to the bar to pay, a man with red hair and an even redder face asked if Scott was there for the season.

"Early for it," the man said. Embroidered in red thread on the pocket of his faded denim shirt, was the name 'Wally'.

Scott frowned as he handed Wally his last twenty dollar bill. "Early?"

"Sure," Wally said, making change with the efficiency of long practice. "They don't usually start taking on until next month."

"Next month," Scott repeated.

"It's mostly cod right now. Not so many boats out."

"Here?"

"Unalaska," Wally said slowly, his hand pausing over the till. "You're on Unalaska. Out on the island."

Scott turned slowly. He looked out of the window. There was snow on the ground. There had been snow, hadn't there? Cold, white snow and the loud roar of rushing water.

When he turned back again, Wally was holding Scott's change out. He was still smiling. Scott took the money and tucked it back into his nearly empty wallet.

Wally squinted, the corners of his eyes crinkling with either good humor or worry or maybe both at the same time. "You looking for work, son?"

Scott nodded wordlessly.

"Sure you are." Wally smiled at him the way Margie had. Changed his tone and spoke more slowly like she had, too. "You go across the bridge. Go down to the docks and find Archie Sutphen. Tell him Wally from the Barrel sent you. Tell him you're a hard worker. Tell him I said to find you something." Wally, studying Scott's face, continued gently, "Don't sweat it neither. You don't gotta know anything to start out. Just go looking for Archie. You're sure to find him near the boats."

Scott nodded. "I've always liked boats."

Wally grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth that were, nonetheless, all straight and present. "You come to the right place then, son. Boats are pretty much all we got."

Scott found the boats easily enough. Wally spoke the truth when he'd said that was all there was. There were houses and a few shops here and there, but across the bridge it was all docks and boats and ropes and the smell of fish.

He found Archie, too, after a fashion. He was walking along the docks, looking up at the boats moored along side, and thinking that they didn't seem so big. That he'd seen things bigger. This is what Scott was doing, walking and looking and thinking, when a heavy, wound up coil of rope hit him in the head. He sprawled onto the ground, pain blooming in his neck. He lay on the ground with his eyes closed and waited for the hurt to go away.

And then, like a beacon in the night, he heard her voice.

"Oh, motherfucker," he heard. "Oh, shit, shit, fuck, shit! I didn't see you!"

Scott opened his eyes. There was a girl on up on the deck of a boat. She seemed to tower above him, bigger than anything he'd ever stood next to. She wore a yellow parka and gloves, but no hat; and the cold, cruel sun warmed to her and made a halo out of her yellow hair.

"You're a girl," Scott said.

The girl squinted with one eye and raised the other brow. "Good eye."

"I didn't think girls were supposed to work on boats."

"Idiot superstition. I've worked on boats plenty without causing any disasters. Well," she amended, appraising his prone body, "not many. Are you okay?"

Scott stood. Nothing hurt, much. He nodded.

"Good. The last thing I need is to be mortally wounding some greenhorn." She bent over, disappearing from view for a moment before reappearing with another coil of rope. "Look out!" she called and heaved it over the side.

Scott jumped out of the way just in time.

"Was there something you needed, Greenie?" The girl was looking down at him, hands on her hips.

Scott nodded. "I'm looking for Archie Sutphen. Wally from the Barrel sent me."

"'Course he did." She grinned at that. "Always taking in the stray dogs, Wally is. When he's got too many of his own, he starts farming them out to Archie."

She disappeared again. This time Scott was already moving before she threw the rope. When she nodded at him, he felt like she'd given him homework and he'd turned it in on time.

Scott had always liked homework.

"He's up the house, over that way." She nodded her chin in the direction he'd come from. "Green shutters. Fence that used be white once, maybe. Can't miss it."

"Thanks." Scott shaded his eyes from the sun.

The girl was yellow and gold and almost too bright to look at for long.

"And tell him Forrester's might have a place for you."

"What's Forrester's?"

The girl grinned. "I am."

She disappeared again, and, though he waited, this time she didn't reappear. He left the docks, going the way she'd said. Sure enough, there was a house with green shutters and a fence that looked like it could have been white once, though only 30 years and an equal number of winters earlier. It hadn't been hard to find, at all.

It was when Scott was knocking on Archie Sutphen's front door when he realized that he wasn't wearing his glasses anymore. The pressure behind his eyes was gone, and his vision was better than 20/20.


End file.
